Spouses Find Job Barriers as They Trail Service Members

Lakesha Cole has been through six deployments and five base transfers as a spouse of a Marine. Each move has represented an exhausting, if familiar routine: There’s the task of packing and unpacking an entire home. Of enrolling three children under the age of 13 in new schools, and tracking down available child care. Of adjusting to a new neighborhood, with new neighbors and friends and routines.

But perhaps the most draining step of the process is the part where the final decision lies mainly outside Cole’s, and the military’s, control: the near-constant effort to find new jobs in new states, even new countries — “to reinvent myself every time I had to pick up and move,” as Cole, 37, described the experience to NBC News.